Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

Cutting, James E.

doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1051-4

Cited by 90 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 95 publications

(136 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Action shots were most numerous at the end of the set-up and the beginning of the climax, while conversations levelled down during the climax. 45 Cutting's (2016) interpretative qualifications illuminated the stylistic distinctions among the acts. They are most informative and any summarisation would be detrimental to the value of the analyses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A psychology of the film

Tan

2018

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson's concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg's argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for researc...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The results of the first stage of the analysis are not displayed here, see Fig. 8 in Cutting (2016). In that stage, the number of associations between all titles regarding all features was reduced to four dimensions (see main text) using principal component analysis.…”

Section: Continuity Of Events and Viewer Attention Hochberg's Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A psychology of the film

Tan

2018

Palgrave Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Shots are here categorised into seven classes according to their duration t d (in seconds), as in Table I. This subdivision is obtained by fitting a log-normal probability density function on GT shot duration data, thus achieving a finer granularity in proximity of the mode. To account for the evolution of pace along years, we consider studies in [39], [41], which report that the average shot duration for a sample of movies from 1960 to 1985 is 7.0 s, while in contemporary movies decreases to 4.3. As an example of the ability of Very Short (VS)…”

Section: A Shot Duration Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who is the Film's Director? Authorship Recognition Based on Shot Features

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We show how low-level formal features, such as shot duration, meant as length of camera takes, and shot scale, i.e. the distance between the camera and the subject, are distinctive of a director's style in art movies. So far such features were thought of not having enough varieties to become distinctive of an author. However our investigation on the full filmographies of six different authors (Scorsese, Godard, Tarr, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman) for a total number of 120 movies analysed second by second, confirms that these shot-related features do not appear as random patterns in movies from the same director. For feature extraction we adopt methods based on both conventional and deep learning techniques. Our findings suggest that feature sequential patterns, i.e. how features evolve in time, are at least as important as the related feature distributions. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study dealing with automatic attribution of movie authorship, which opens up interesting lines of cross-disciplinary research on the impact of style on the aesthetic and emotional effects on the viewers.

show abstract

“…Genre is a cognitive schema that offers individuals information regarding categories of movies, novels, and music (Cutting, 2016;Shevy, 2008). Movie audiences likely use Table 1 Examples of LIWC 2015 language categories for statistical analysis genre in much the same way that people use any other categories in everyday life.…”

Section: Examining Film (Preferences) Through Genrementioning

confidence: 99%

Genre-typical narrative arcs in films are less appealing to lay audiences and professional film critics

Nalabandian

Ireland

2018

Behav Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People tend to like stimuli-ranging from human faces to text-that are prototypical, and thus easily processed. However, recent research has suggested that less typical stimuli may be preferred in creative contexts, such as fine art or music lyrics. In an archival sample of movie scripts, we tested whether genre-typicality predicted film ratings as a function of rater role (novice audience member or expert film critic). Genre-typicality was operationalized as the profile correlations between linguistic arcs (across five segments, or acts) for each script and within-genre averages. We predicted (1) that critics would prefer more disfluent (genreatypical) films and general audiences would prefer fluent (genre-typical) films, and (2) that these differences would be most pronounced for genres expected to be more entertaining (e.g., action/adventure) than challenging (e.g., tragedy). Partly consistent with our hypotheses, the results showed that critics gave higher ratings to action/adventure films with less typical positive emotion arcs. However, regardless of audience-member or professional-critic status, higher ratings were attributed to films that were more genre-atypical (or disfluent), in terms of analytic thinking, narrative action, and emotional tone, across all genres except family/kids films. Such findings support the growing literature on the appeal of disfluency in the arts and have relevance for researchers in psychology and computer science who are interested in computational linguistic approaches to attitudes, film, and literature.

show abstract

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

Cited by 90 publications

References 95 publications

A psychology of the film

A psychology of the film

Who is the Film's Director? Authorship Recognition Based on Shot Features

Genre-typical narrative arcs in films are less appealing to lay audiences and professional film critics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About